About

About the Political TV Ad Archive

The Political TV Ad Archive -- powered by the Internet Archive

The Political TV Ad Archive is a project of the Internet Archive. This site provides a searchable, viewable, and shareable online archive of 2016 political TV ads, married with trustworthy fact-checking and reporting. Political TV ad spending cost billions in the election, yet the same local stations that aired the ads provide very little solid reporting on politics. Even fewer corrected political misinformation. In partnership with trusted journalistic organizations, the Political TV Ad Archive provided a free service for journalists, civic organizations, academics and the general public to track these ads in context. The project is open source and available on github: here is this site and the Duplitron.

About the Internet Archive and TV News Archive

The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library founded by Brewster Kahle in 1996 with the mission to provide “Universal access to all Knowledge.” The organization seeks to preserve the world’s cultural heritage and to provide open access to our shared knowledge in the digital era, supporting the work of historians, scholars, journalists, students, the blind and reading disabled, as well as the general public.

The TV News Archive, launched in 2012, also a project of the Internet Archive, is a research library service is intended to enhance the capabilities of journalists, scholars, teachers, librarians, civic organizations and other engaged citizens. It repurposes closed captioning to enable users to search, quote and borrow U.S. TV news programs. Available at no charge, the public can use the index of searchable text and short streamed clips to explore TV news, discover important resources, understand context, evaluate assertions of fact, engage with others and share insights.

Our funders

The first phase of the Political TV Ad Archive, covering key 2016 primary elections, was funded by a $200,000 grant from the Knight News Challenge, an initiative of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The Challenge was a collaboration joined by the Rita Allen Foundation, the Democracy Fund, and the Hewlett Foundation. The Democracy Fund also granted $49, 634 to support joint trainings of journalists in key primary states in partnership with the American Press Institute. The Rita Allen Foundation and the Democracy Fund have supported the general election phase of the project with grants of $110,000 and $100,000 respectively. Additional support came from personal donations by Christopher Buck ($25,000) and Craig Newmark ($20,000). The January 2016 launch event was co-sponsored by the National Press Club Journalism Institute.

Learn More About the Political TV Ad Archive

About the Archive

The Political TV Ad Archive collected and, using innovative open source technology, tracked airings of political ads in key markets the 2016 election cycle.

The collection also linked ads to fact-checks by national fact-checking organizations. In addition to tracking airings across key primary states, the collection includes ads that may air elsewhere or exclusively on social media.

Recent Blog Posts

by Katie Donnelly Over the past extremely unpredictable election year, the Internet Archive invented new methods and tools to give journalists, researchers, and the public the power to access, scrutinize, share, and thoroughly fact-check political ads, presidential debates, and TV news broadcasts. Our efforts were designed to help citizens better understand the patterns of political messages designed to persuade them […]

Guest post by Kalev Leetaru Today the Internet Archive announces a new interactive timeline visualization–the Television Explorer–that lets you trace how any keyword–think “emails”, “tax returns”, “alt-right”–has been covered on U.S. television news over the past half-decade. See the Television Explorer, a new tool for exploring TV News. Over the past year and a half, the GDELT Project and the Internet […]